26 February 2008: For many, the post-electoral violence that has gripped Kenya over the last two months appears like an unfortunate blip on an otherwise spotless record. How could, the reasoning goes, the model of peace and stability in East Africa, the nation of hakuna matata, suddenly fall off the wagon?

The answer is obviously complex, but the question is loaded. The assumption that all has been well in Kenya since its triumphant birth into an independent nation-state almost half a century ago, may need some re-tooling.

"Peace and stability were a thin covering over a boiling cauldron," says one researcher who's lived in Kenya for the last four decades and is now being forced to leave her home in Nairobi (she has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals under current conditions). "The cauldron has boiled over. Kenyans have been amazingly restrained and accepting for 45 years. This latest insult was just too much."

While many underlying factors can be blamed for the recent spate of violence that has claimed over 1,000 lives and displaced over 300,000, the root of the problem rests with an institution that pervades even the most stable of African republics: tribalism.

"Tribalism has been there as long as Kenya has been independent," says Martin Njoroge, a professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. "One is 'taught' early enough whom not to marry, do business with, etc. just because of ethnic identity."

And in Kenya, a country with more than 40 tribes each trying to carve out their own piece of the pie, such tribalism has taken its toll. Although Njoroge is quick to caution that among more educated and some younger Kenyans, tribalism has become less of an issue.

The Trouble with Tribalism

For those shocked of Kenya's decend into violence, a cold, hard look at the country's history is in need—with particular scrutiny on its former presidents. Fortunately, for clarity at least, that happens to be a very short list.

Kenya's first president after independence, the freedom fighter Jomo Kenyatta, built his credibility in the Mau Mau rebellion—the largest revolution in Kenya against its British colonizers.

Soon after assuming power, Kenyatta bent to the forces of tribalism. Civil service jobs favored his Kikuyu tribe, which had already benefited under the British system, at the expense of other groups.

For many Kikuyu's, the tribal favoritism was not wholly illogical; they had, after all, been the tribe that bore the brunt of the freedom struggle.

After Kenyatta's death in 1978, Daniel Arap Moi rose to power. Many hoped that because he was a member of one of Kenya's smaller tribes, the Kalenjin (best known for their long-distance running skills in the Olympics), that things in Nairobi would start to change. Sadly for Kenya, that would not be the case.

Moi spent more 20 years plundering Kenya's government, establishing a single-party state, bringing benefits back to his homeland in the Rift Valley, and replacing many civil service personnel with his own Kalenjin group.

Perhaps the best illustration of Moi's tribal tendencies was the building of a new international airport in the Kalenjin town of Eldoret, a small settlement compared to other much larger ones in Western Kenya. Kisumu, a predominantly Luo city and Kenya's third largest, would have been a far more ideal location for such a project. Today the “international” airport has so few flights and is hemorrhaging money so fast that the Kenya Airports Authority is planning to grow an expansive forest on the property to raise funds to meet operating costs.

In 2002, the people of Kenya, sick and tired of corruption and tribal favoritism—except of course, when it favored their own tribe—elected their third president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. Kibaki ran on a platform of anti-corruption, but like his predecessors, he too felt the allure of the power and money that came from the nation's highest office.

For the Luo's of western Kenya, the nation's second largest tribe, the bite of tribalism has been felt for decades. In 1969, Tom Mboya, a widely popular Luo figure who many predicted was going to be Kenya's next president, was assassinated. Now their new leader, Raila Odinga, has been cheated of a victory. And to top it all off, they missed out on that airport. Needless to say the people of Luoland are angry.

Compounding the Luo's woes is the circumcision divide.

To a circumcising society, such as the Kikuyus, any non-circumcised male is considered a boy. Thus for a conservative member of a circumcising tribe, any Luo (or any other non-circumcising people) would not be considered fit for governing. A number of anthropologists (including our anonymous professor) agree that the circumcision factor has played heavily in Luo marginalization.

One only has to look at the reports of forced circumcision of Luos and Turkanas by Kikuyu extremists since the election for evidence of how this age-old practice pervades even modern Kenyan society.

The simple truth is that too many of the tribes that have felt the short end of the tribalist stick, Kibaki's alleged vote-rigging is just the latest development in almost half a century of life under Kikuyu domination. For some, the recent election was simply the straw that broke the camel's back.

Integral to Kenya’s post-electoral malaise has been the relationship between tribalism and landownership, a subject that each successive Kenyan government has managed to avoid.

Much of the current geography of landownership was decided soon after Kenya's independence, during the Kenyatta regime. Those paying attention should have correctly guessed that this means a disproportionate share of Kenya's land is held by Kikuyus—even outside Kikuyu homelands; even in Luoland.

"The cleansing of Kikuyus from Rift Valley, I think, is a way of protesting against Kikuyu dominance in agriculture and land ownership, even when far removed from their ancestral land," says Njoroge.

None of this is to say that vile acts of aggression against innocent Kikuyu's has been justified, or that counterattacks against Luo's has either. What this does illustrate, is the extent to which tribe defines the people of Kenya more than their collective Kenyan identity.

And that bi-polar identity, it can be said, is at the root of the problem.

A Way Forward

Many want to know what it will take to get the country right again. Perhaps a power-sharing agreement will return Kenya to peace and prosperity? Maybe Kofi Annan will produce some kind of coalition government from his talks.

But the hard truth to accept is that Kenya has never been perfectly right, and until the core issues that spawned the recent conflict are resolved, Kenya will never be right.

In the last few months, Kenya's tribal map has been altered dramatically and, it’s possible, irreparably.

"In many communities especially in the Rift Valley, the ethnic makeup has been drastically changed by the killing and displacement of minority ethnic populations," says Chris Albin-Lackey, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. "If some way is not found to reverse this, the ethnic map of Kenya will be fundamentally altered in ways that will give rise to increased levels of ethnic polarization. Those, in turn, could well serve to fuel further violence in the future."

Essentially, what Kenya is seeing is a reversion to the ethnic map as it looked at the turn of the century, with members of each tribe residing within their own traditional homelands.

While such division is a step backward for tribal integration and the establishment of a strong "Kenyan" identity, it has forced Kenyans to begin asking themselves the tough questions they've avoided for so long.

The nation that today is known as Kenya was handed down to this collection of 40 plus East African tribes by the British. Few had time to question the merits of a nation that linked together such disparate groups of people: Bantu and Nilotic; Muslim, Christian and Animist; circumcising and non-circumcising; pastoralist and sedentary. Few were able to ask whether the country should assume a federalist model or focus power in the executive office.

Ultimately, few Kenyans, have had to think about what it means to be Kenyan.

Such post-colonial anxieties have plagued African states from the massive, dysfunctional Democratic Republic of Congo, to the postage stamp-sized bi-ethnic nation of Rwanda.

Today, through the misery and bloodshed, there is perhaps the slightest of silver linings to Kenya’s current state of affairs. For the first time in the nation-state’s short history, Kenyans are confronting what it means to be Kenyan and what their country should be.

While such critical inward thinking holds the potential to produce a stronger nation, any solution to Kenya's problems will hinge on an overall cleaning up of government. Kenya's kleptocratic system of governance, which consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt in the world, is in most desperate need of an overhaul.

Many argue that the post-electoral violence is as much about bad governance as it is about the actual election.

"Looking closely at the ones fighting and very vocal, one notices the young people, the slum dwellers, who feel the government is not doing much to address their plight. Thus they are disillusioned and frustrated," says Njoroge.

Not to be left out, the international community may have a role to play in Kenya in the immediate future, says Albin-Lackey.

"The international community," he says, "should be doing all it can to ensure that any eventual compromise includes mechanisms to ensure accountability and reconciliation in the wake of violence; deal with underlying issues such as land and the winner-take-all nature of Kenyan politics; reform of the electoral system; and a guarantee that this process ends with a guarantee that the rights of Kenya's voters will ultimately be respected."

Such measures will certainly bring Kenya back to stability. But just how sustainable a peace that will be has yet to be determined.